A Quick Introduction to Postcritical Preemptive
Self-destructivism
by Staniel Crocker
This school of literature and art has developed over the last five to
ten years as a response to contemporary critical theory, in an attempt
to depose the critic from its unheralded stealth usurpation of the lordship
of the literary world. The author has, over the last century, been robbed
of significance in the literary endeavor, as the creative process of
writing has yielded to the merely productive process of publishing,
and the constructive process of reading has been abandoned in favor
of compulsive, masturbatory de-construction. The author has been pronounced
as dead as God, also sprach Benjamin, and the text has been proclaimed
irrelevant. The hapless reader has been reduced to the state of an ideological
automaton, helplessly circumscribed by the anachronistically pre-Heisenbergian
determinism of the Sapir-Whorf Black Iron Fortress.
Of course, the people who are promulgating such theories are almost
exclusively the critics. Postcritical preemptive self-destructivists
such as Dilliam Weefoke have applied deconstructivist methods to the
critical paradigm itself and have concluded that
[T]he critics are, in the main, a bunch of wannabes who have
little capacity for creative thought of their own and are capable of
gaining the attention and recognition they desperately crave only by
slavishly applying other people's marginally relevant theories and tired
ideologies to the creative work of someone else, in hopes that doing
so will somehow expose the actual creative work as some kind of cardboard
façade while simultaneously making themselves look awfully clever,
for having had the idea to do so.1
Weefoke goes on to suggest in his short work "My Corpus Collosum
Ate Your Patriarch" that the creators of original works can only
regain a certain measure of power if they preemptively critique their
own work, robbing the critics of their apparent cleverness, and unmasking
them as purveyors of the obvious and uninteresting. This idea itself
is critiqued within the very work where it is first presented in the
now classic exchange between the legless writer known only to the reader
as "Mister Beepers" and Professor Shiv, wherein Shiv promises
to eradicate all meaning, and Beepers famously retorts "Blimpulix."
Shirley Puddin's retro-fictional essays show how the mind's capacity
to make meaning from nonsense eviscerates deconstruction by causing
it to tear itself apart, exposing the inherent folly in trying to expose
the folly inherent in the creative endeavor. Though most of her work
already predates Weefoke's observation that compulsive deconstruction
with no attempt at reconstruction is merely destructive, Puddin's æsthetic
clearly reflects the same understanding, along with the meta-jaded ironic
cynicism that allows her to beat the critics to the punch, by weaving
creative self-destruction into the very structure of her writing. She
knows exactly what the critics will say about each part of her work
and says it before they get the chance, rendering her words nonsensical
in a way that highlights the utter impossiblity of nonsense.
Postcritical preemptive self-destructivists like Tom Voran like to make
explicit the critical conceits in their works by introducing us to characters
with names like "Leuko Geron Paternekus," "Lars Sphincter,"
"Ms. Vyctym," and "Whuppin Boy." Others, like Weefoke
and Earnest Momkin breathe new life into the the tradition of author
intrusion, interjecting blatant self-criticisms and analysis of the
work right into the text, sometimes injected into the middle of sentences.
Momkin forestalls the self-congratulatory, overly confident speculation
of the critics as to how his father's decades-long disappearance, sudden
re-emergence, and subsequent claims of childhood regression and drunken
abuse by his now grown son, affected the younger Momkin's writing, by
popping in at opportune moments in the narrative and spilling the beans
to the reader. He spells out exactly which parts of the story are fabrications,
amalgamations, or embellishments, and which parts actually happened.
He often will then proceed to critique that explicatory voice with another
that questions how his portrayal of the events is determined by his
role in the patriarchal system, especially considering the fact that
he is accused of humiliating and unclogging his nose at his estranged
father, who came to him in the form of a (many would argue theoretically
impossible) disempowered white man (ie a child -- one which the younger
Momkin denies ever adopting). A third voice (or fourth, if you count
the original narrative voice) mercilessly mocks the critical voice and
openly dares the reader to try and figure out which voice speaks for
the real Momkin. This final voice sometimes viciously berates the readers
themselves, but in such a devilishly clever way as to include them in
the joke -- ultimately played on the critics.
This rebellion of creative fecundity comes at the end of a century
defined by the cooption of every creative endeavor by the merely productive.
It is the war whoop of the individual creative personality so disempowered
by mass-production, mass-marketing, mass-distribution, mass-consumption,
and the global economy, that it has nothing more to lose by expressing
its imaginative uniqueness directly to the world. It has come full-circle
by going in a straight line and has gained political power by being
voted down, gained economic power by being downsized. It is conscious
of the fact that deconstruction ultimately deconstructs itself, but
it has been handed a world that still needs deconstructing in order
to be reshaped creatively. It is aware that relativism can only be relative,
admitting the fact that some things, like the velocity of light in a
vacuum, comedy, and tragedy, actually are universal constants, and it
uses this to further its own ends.
Industrialization has involved a process of the increasing mechanization
and automation of the productive process, and the consequent mechanization
of the worker. The apogee of industrialism is represented by computerized
automation, which utterly replaces the mechanical functionality of the
worker and therein sows the seeds of its own undoing. Simultaneously,
the increase of productivity ensures that everything, including the
automated tools that have mechanized and finally replaced the worker,
become available to the consumer at low, low prices and huge quantities.
The mass-production/mass-consumption economy finally deconstructs itself
as the workers, alienated from their individually self-expressive "species-being,"
roboticized, and finally discarded by the corporate machine as obsolete
production equipment, begin very slowly to realize that they have as
little need for the corporation as the corporation now seems to have
for them, due to the mass-production and -distribution of the self-same
productivity tool that alienated them from their role as robotic wage-slaves.
The microcomputer that liberates the corporation from the untidiness
of the human worker liberates the worker from the tyranny of the corporation.
Postcritical preemptive self-destructivism is the literary harbinger
of the coming postindustrial revolution of the creative over the productive.
Shirley Puddin's guerrilla poetry postings to the Gnutella peer-to-peer
file-sharing network are a direct attack on the very business model
of the publishing industry that declined publication of her third collection
of poems "...on the basis that they contained no product tie-ins
or other content that our market research shows will appeal to our target
demographic..." and her fourth collection on the basis that "...the
intellectual properties referenced in these works are not available
to us or our parent company, and the manner in which they are referenced
would create a high liability to our company." These über-mature,
self-aware poems gleefully provide the reader with original creative
substance, while shamelessly hawking Puddin's collections published
by Book-On-Demand publisher Alexandria2K.com.
I don't need You
suck My
suck My
Twenty Percent Harper
and Row
Row
Row my royalty ass
Merrily down the rutted
Infromation wagon trail
bite Your
bite Your
Server Push Bubble
and Peer
Peer
Peer into the Black Hole
Bunghole money pit
DARPA built
eat Your
eat Your
Brick and Meter Broadcast
and Sell
Sell
Sell yourself to yourself
Buyer better beware
They just don't get it
I can sell Ten Percent and make as much
Poems like the above, and Puddin's "Ed eat this poem," distributed
under a license that allows them to be copied at no cost, providing
they remain properly credited, have gathered a following of disenchanted
readers, eager for the æsthetic experience promised by her printed
volumes. They claim a direct connection with her and her work, some
having copied her poems directly from her hard disk, and more than one
claiming to "...feel a warm glow and a closeness after having been
personally emailed one of her infamous inchoate rants." Many of
these post-postmodern readers compulsively collect her books in their
various incarnations and "alternate art" print runs. Some
say they wouldn't buy them if they thought that the vast majority of
the cover price went into the pockets of the giant media outlets.
The Meta-Dadaist automated sculpture of Alfredo Wiens-Yamamoto (previously
known simply as MUK-YOO) displays a deep understanding of the absurdities
underlying the status quo economic and social supersystems and their
relationship to the individual as producer and consumer. His "This
Wacky Machine Make Itself Bite Dust -- You Buy and Watch" updates
Duchamp and does him one or two better. The text that scrolls across
the liquid crystal display mercilessly lambastes the sculpture, the
sculptor, and the viewer, for participating in such a senselessly destructive
enterprise while the last rain forests are being consumed in flames
and the world becomes polluted to the point of uninhabitability because
of just this kind of wasteful mentality that says that simply because
we have built up systems that hide the actual cost of digging all these
minerals out of the ground and putting them together in amazing ways,
we think that we can fill the world with products destined for instant
obsolescence, use them up, and throw them away, with no end in sight.
All the while, the machine is advancing a drill toward its CPU by means
of an outrageously complicated electro-mechanical Rube Goldberg affair
that inevitably results in its self-destruction after some interval
that is impossible to determine exactly at the outset because the whole
system exhibits nonlinear dynamics. It usually takes between two hours
and three weeks for the drill to pierce the microprocessor's ceramic
package and render the machine useless, requiring the artist to return
to the gallery with the spare parts necessary to effect the sculpture's
repair. The very fact that he dutifully repairs the machine each time
increases both the absurdity and the profound meaning encapsulated in
the triple entendre Wiens-Yamamoto is trying to communicate.
The message is nothing less than the ballsy assertion that even the
most nihilistic shriek of the human psyche can't but express a positive
meaning, and that the very notion that an artist's self-aware attempt
to convey meaning is passè is an idea that necessarily
makes itself passè when followed to its logical conclusion,
rendering all the more meaningful the statements of those who have the
gall to think they have something to say.
Firing the Acme Disintigrator Ray Gun in a Closed
Universe: How Contemporary Critical Theory Demands its Own Irrelevance.
Dilliam Weefoke, Proceedings of the Atlas Fellowes, Vol. 97,
p. 328.
